Los Angeles Dodgers SP/DH Shohei Ohtani is making an amount of money on his 10-year, $700 million contract that most millionaires don’t dream of making in their lifetime. That’s an amount of money that can distort a person’s priorities.
Not Ohtani. His brilliance at the plate and on the mound showed incredible perseverance, since he won a World Series in 2024 and then made sure he could return to the mound for a 2025 October repeat run.
As Dodgers CEO Stan Kasten revealed, Ohtani is taking seriously a promise to deliver a World Series championship to the city of Los Angeles and the franchise every year for the duration of his contract.
“After we win last year in Yankee Stadium, he comes up to me — and he was saying it to everyone — ‘Nine more to go, Stan.’ And then this year, as soon as it was over, the first thing he says is, ‘Eight more to go.’ He’s fixated on that and he keeps working toward it. I’m not anyone to say he can’t lead us to that. I’m not going to say it’s impossible,” Kasten said on the “Starkville” podcast with Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville.
Of course, that’s player-speak. But you can’t argue with the results thus far.
If the addition of Ohtani, which coincided with Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s $325 million arrival, helps the team with more international free agents this offseason and moving forward, it’s an even better deal for both parties.
The truth of the matter, though, is that Ohtani’s contract pays for itself in Japanese interest and market share. Ohtani was the biggest off-field investment ever for a reason. And there’s a reason it happened in the L.A. Market.
It’s rare for a player to deliver on- and off-field results like Ohtani. It can’t be coincidental that it coincides with a symbiotic relationship with the man running the show in Chavez Ravine.